Kosovar mantia/mantija

Lude also showed me how to make mantia. These are what I would describe as mini pita-rolls. We made them stuffed with a meat-onion-paprika filling, but Lude said that they are also tasty with a cheese filling.

Lude made the filling in advance. It had equal volumes of ground meat and onions and was spiced with several spoonfuls of paprika.

For this recipe she made the dough the same way she did for her other pitas (find the recipe here). She made two balls of dough that were the same size and let them rest.

She rolled out one ball and spread some melted margarine around (one could also use butter). Watch her great technique for spreading the margarine around without using a brush.

The circle of dough was then folded in half, and rectangle-sized pieces were cut out. The average piece measured about 2 x 3 inches. I didn't get any good video of how to roll these up so let me try to explain. Once the filling has been placed in one stretched end of your piece of dough, hold the filled edge of your piece in one hand (in your left hand if you're right handed). Then with your other hand stretch and pull open the dough that is closest to the filling and then roll the filling into the stretched out dough. Continue until you had reached the end of your piece.

Before baking - we ran out of filling so some folded up extra filo dough fills the center.

After baking

Look at those fine layers of phyllo!

Envelope-style of opening phyllo for a pita with leeks

Lude graciously invited me over to her home to watch her make two other savory pastries with homemade phyllo dough. The first which I show in this post is another way of making a pita (pite in Albanian).

This pita has one layer of thicker dough on the bottom and 2-4 layers of thin dough on the top. Why the variability in the number of top layers? Read on. There is a clever and easy method to producing the thin layers for the top of the pita. This pita strongly resembles the kind of pita most people (at least Greeks) make with store-bought phyllo; it is simply thinner.

This pita was to have a leek and Schmand filling. Below you can see the finely chopped leeks.

She had made the filling prior to my arrival. It had

4 leeks (preferring green ones over white ones), finely chopped

1 1/3 tsp salt

5 tsp sunflower oil

200 g / 7 oz. Schmand

(You can substitute Schmand with sour cream or heavy cream instead. Click here to see the German language page on Schmand translated into English by Google.)

First Lude made the dough the same way she did for the dough she made back in January. Instead of dividing the dough into two balls of equal size she made one ball one-fourth the size of the other.

Here she rolls out the larger ball of dough for the bottom of the pan.

Watch the neat way Lude transfers the dough to the baking pan, which has been pre-oiled with sunflower seed oil. Lude then rolls out the smaller ball of dough that will go on top of the filling.

She's rolled the dough out to a size where it covers the bottom of her pan, and then some. It is quite important that the edges of the dough hang over the sides of the pan. Then the filling is spooned into the pan, after which Lude spreads it evenly into the pan.

The smaller ball of dough that was rolled out to go on top of the filling is now placed on top of the filling. Its edges are stretched so that it just covers the filing.

Lude's daughter Marigona then spreads the top layer of dough with a watery mixture of Schmand and a little sunflower seed oil.

Now here's the special part. Lude carefully stretches out one edge of the bottom layer of dough. Watch the video - she stretches each of the sides so that it covers at least a third of the whole pan. She then folds each edge over and on top of the topmost layer. She repeats this process with this the remaining three edges. While Lude is working on stretching out one of the edges, Marigona spreads each stretched out edge with the watery Schmand/sunflower seed oil mix.

The pita was baked in a gas oven at the hottest setting (here it was setting 8). We didn't time how long the pita was baked, at least 20 minutes. It was simply baked until the top looked done.

Here is the final product! You can see the edges of the folded-over edges. Cut into rectangles or squares and serve.

The leek/Schmand pita is delicious and even more so if the warm pita is spread with cold yogurt.